A transitional point of media consumption: From 'we' to 'me' media: The need for research to understand change

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Sara Sheridan, Market Research Society, Annual Conference, 2012

This paper argues that current media research models are broken, and that there is a need to fix them. View Summary

This paper argues that current media research models are broken, and that there is a need to fix them. It puts forward a methodology to overcome the challenges of traditional media research. Switched On is described as a 360° model for research that uses two types of camera to record and then observe individuals' media consumption, free of moderator influence and respondent direction. Examples of this model being used on consumers are then discussed.

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Translating the language of consumers into global fundraising efforts

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Sotta Long and Nick Chiarelli, ESOMAR, Best Case History, Congress, Amsterdam, September 2011

Until recently the world of fundraising relied on goodwill to motivate supporters to donate their time or money to good causes. View Summary

Until recently the world of fundraising relied on goodwill to motivate supporters to donate their time or money to good causes. Increasingly however, not-for-profit organisations have marketing and insight departments that are attuning themselves to how people around the world are living their lives and how fundraising efforts can best fit in with those fast-changing attitudes, values and lifestyles. This case study shows how Iconoculture and UNICEF are working together to embed consumer trend frameworks around the organisation as a way of understanding supporters, both in an individual and a corporate environment. It shares both the process and some of the latest outputs, in the form of new fundraising ideas and communications strategies.

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The Future is Now: In Pursuit of a More Efficient and Effective Media Strategy

Poltrack and Bowen share a system that allows advertisers to have a 360-degree perspective of their core prospects with regard to media consumption, which will enable marketers to move beyond pure dem... View Summary

Poltrack and Bowen share a system that allows advertisers to have a 360-degree perspective of their core prospects with regard to media consumption, which will enable marketers to move beyond pure demographic reach to quality reach.

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The March to Reliable Metrics: A Half-Century of Coming Closer to the Truth

Reach and frequency are key concepts advertisers face when selecting media for their campaigns. Around the world, the advertising industry relies on audience research for insights into how different media outlets perform on these key concepts. View Summary

Reach and frequency are key concepts advertisers face when selecting media for their campaigns. Around the world, the advertising industry relies on audience research for insights into how different media outlets perform on these key concepts. In this contribution, the authors discuss the developments in audience research in three themes: (syndicated) audience research into readership of print media, ratings of television, and Internet, studies on the reach of individual advertisements, studies on the quality of reach, in particular the influence of the media context. The authors conclude with some suggestions: the need for cross-media data, the need for hybrid data collection that includes electronic and passive measurement of media use and the need for new metrics, such as measures of implicit processing of sponsored media content and measures of consumer generated brand communications.

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Maintenance person or architect? The role of academic advertising research in building better understanding

This paper suggests that, while advertising has changed, advertising research has not. Indeed, questions asked of advertising research more than 20 years ago have still not been answered. View Summary

This paper suggests that, while advertising has changed, advertising research has not. Indeed, questions asked of advertising research more than 20 years ago have still not been answered. The enormity of change in advertising compounded by the lack of response from researchers suggests the traditional academic advertising research model requires more than routine maintenance. It seeks an architect with vision to redesign an academic research model that is probably broken or badly outdated. Five areas of the academic research approach are identified as needing rethinking: (1) the advertising problem, (2) sample frame and subjects, (3) assumptions regarding consumer behaviour, (4) research methodologies and (5) findings. Suggestions are made for improvement. But perhaps the biggest challenge is academic leadership. This paper proposes the establishment of a blue-ribbon panel to report back on recommended changes or improvements.

This brief paper reports on the use of Atlas tags to track internet behaviour. These tags can be combined with user surveys in order to develop scorecards correlating online engagement with projected revenue, brand preference, satisfaction and net promoter score. View Summary

This brief paper reports on the use of Atlas tags to track internet behaviour. These tags can be combined with user surveys in order to develop scorecards correlating online engagement with projected revenue, brand preference, satisfaction and net promoter score. By analysing consumers' self-reported interests and need states, and matching the data to observed online behaviour, it is possible to develop an overall framework of how shoppers progress from initial investigation of a brand or product, to in-depth research, to developing purchase intent, then purchasing. Based on the paper's findings, the authors recommend using personalised messages to drive interaction and tailoring creative and media placement to the consumer's particular need state.

As argued by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail, global scale markets, falling costs of storage, and falling costs of distribution have resulted in digitally based businesses today being able to sell niche items and niche content profitably—this is reflected in media usage as well as in retail examples. View Summary

As argued by Chris Anderson in The Long Tail, global scale markets, falling costs of storage, and falling costs of distribution have resulted in digitally based businesses today being able to sell niche items and niche content profitably—this is reflected in media usage as well as in retail examples. Though media have been fragmenting into ever-smaller niches for some time, it has only been economically viable to measure the audiences of the largest media outlets. To accurately measure new media audiences, it seems likely that hybrid systems will be adopted, using random probability sampling for the biggest TV programs and largest magazines, for example, and non-sample-based measures for the niche media events in the long tail. This will pose a serious challenge to a media industry that has tended to abhor data integration,modeling, fusion, and hybrid systems.

8

Touchpoint Tracking: turning what we do on its head

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Fiona Blades, ESOMAR, Annual Congress, Berlin, September 2007

'Everyone is going to be talking touchpoints as the year progresses.' This was Mark Ritson's prediction in the first edition of Marketing Magazine in 2007. View Summary

'Everyone is going to be talking touchpoints as the year progresses.' This was Mark Ritson's prediction in the first edition of Marketing Magazine in 2007. But how is this new focus going to affect the way we track and understand our brands and communications campaigns? The paper describes a new touchpoint tracking approach, TROI, and explores the implications for communications research in the future, based on discussions with several leading experts from different sides of the communications industry.

Today's measures of 'vehicle exposure' will not be the measures of the future. Increasing sample sizes will eventually lose the battle as a consequence of ever-increasing fragmentation of media behaviour. View Summary

Today's measures of 'vehicle exposure' will not be the measures of the future. Increasing sample sizes will eventually lose the battle as a consequence of ever-increasing fragmentation of media behaviour. Fusion of existing currencies will not be the ultimate answer. Future models will most likely be based on passive registration of the behaviour of complete universes or very large samples. With the era of online mass participation and user-generated content will come the next generation of more creative and interactive online research tools. This paper establishes principles upon which to base such an approach.

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Convergence? Try frag-vergence

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Sam Smith, Market Research Society, Annual Conference, 2007

For years there has been talk of convergence flying around the MR industry, and this has extended to institutions such as the BBC, which is trying to focus on multi-platform content creation that brings together different kinds of creativity. View Summary

For years there has been talk of convergence flying around the MR industry, and this has extended to institutions such as the BBC, which is trying to focus on multi-platform content creation that brings together different kinds of creativity. To successfully understand convergence, however, it must be combined with notions of fragmentation and personalisation of media. These trends working together, and will have profound consequences on market research and the media sector. It discusses what this means for the BBC, and what it may mean for other organisations, as well as posing some questions for the future.

The impact of fragmentation is a universal feature of the modern world, limited not only to the media, as some market researchers appear to believe, nor even to the range of goods and services available to consumers. View Summary

The impact of fragmentation is a universal feature of the modern world, limited not only to the media, as some market researchers appear to believe, nor even to the range of goods and services available to consumers. Rather, this Viewpoint piece argues, we are living in an increasingly 'splintered' and heterogeneous society. This poses a real challenge to market research, as customers are increasingly varying their decisions and choices, and are thus making all brands and products 'minority brands'. As a result, in the future, minority marketing may become a crucial advertising tool as mass marketing becomes increasingly out-of-date.

In this paper the authors would like to produce some ideas on improving the impact of qualitative research. View Summary

In this paper the authors would like to produce some ideas on improving the impact of qualitative research. By impact we mean a positive influence on the decision-making process and on the decision-makers. First the authors take a look at the field of decision-making, and the role of qualitative research among other disciplines in this field. Then the authors take a look at the barriers that may prevent qualitative research from further qualitative growth, and at the opportunities for more impact. Using an example of a very small but high impact research, the authors take a look at the possibilities for the qualitative research world to shift to more pro-active research: pro-search.

The author recently conducted an online survey to better understand the views of U.S. and U.K. View Summary

The author recently conducted an online survey to better understand the views of U.S. and U.K. media and marketing research professionals as they relate to the quality and salience of research resources they use in making day-to-day media selection, product usage and targeting decisions. The author expects that the results of both this survey and this paper will help initiate an industry dialogue relative to the perceived equity that various media and marketing research resources possess in today’s rather cluttered product marketplace. This paper briefly outlines some of the more difficult challenges that the research industry faces relative to research quality threats, heightened merger and acquisition activity and diminished survey salience. It then assesses survey findings and provides both respondent and IMS forecasts relative to the anticipated shape of the research marketplace as we move toward 2010.

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Advertising Effectiveness, So Now We Know

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ESOMAR, Marketing in Asia, Manila, November 1998

This paper sets out to review a number of important issues in advertising and media in Asia. The introduction is taken up with describing some changes in marketing and advertising practise in Asia over the past ten to fifteen years. View Summary

This paper sets out to review a number of important issues in advertising and media in Asia. The introduction is taken up with describing some changes in marketing and advertising practise in Asia over the past ten to fifteen years. The impacts of these changes on media are then discussed. This serves to explain why there is a need for primary research into media effectiveness in Asia. The Media Observer technique and theoretical framework is then introduced. In the conference presentation, the final section will be comprised of data from the first Media Observer study in Hong Kong, which is currently being processed at the time of submission of this paper. The Hong Kong data will be compared with norms derived from European Media Observer studies.

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Back to the Fundamentals of Media Research……in a New Fast Changing World

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ESOMAR, Media Research, Mexico City, October 1998

The present situation in media research shows changes on four main aspects: abundance of data and processing supplies, speeding up of mutations and acceleration of trends, dispersion of practices and ... View Summary

The present situation in media research shows changes on four main aspects: abundance of data and processing supplies, speeding up of mutations and acceleration of trends, dispersion of practices and explosion of rules, and inter-penetration between disciplines.Before this profusion of new medias and new rules, how should we react to deal with renewal and what are the consequences on our practices? The answers will be found in returning to the fundamentals of media research: targeting, media audience, research tools, and global approach of media.

Rather than making the simplistic assumption that research is always passive and merely adapts to change, the reality of media research today is that there is an extreme interdependency between media and research. View Summary

Rather than making the simplistic assumption that research is always passive and merely adapts to change, the reality of media research today is that there is an extreme interdependency between media and research. To illustrate this, I will talk about four different media environments and the evolution of research within those environments. These environments are: the domestic print market, the international print market, the domestic television market, and, finally, the domestic measurement of the World Wide Web. The conclusion is that if our industry, and we ourselves as researchers, constantly think of research as adapting, we will miss the opportunity to guide our industry away from evolutionary dead-ends. If, on the other hand, we think of our industry as a complex system, where nothing comes first, there is the opportunity for the development of radically different and potentially efficient marketing systems in the future.